Europeanization: A Governance Approach

Abstract

[Introduction]. Most scholars deal with Europeanization as the impact of the EU’s impact on Member States, while others (notably Helen Wallace, 2000) view the EU as one feature of Europeanization. The focus here is on the former. Wallace’s arguments are important in highlighting the importance of placing the impact of the EU on Member States in the context of other sources of change. However, the purpose here is to understand the effect on politics in the domestic arena of the EU, which is, as Olson (2002:6) notes, the ‘core political project in Europe’ (Olsen, 2002: 6). Europeanization studies reveal considerable variation in the impact of the EU on member states. In this context, this paper argues for an approach to Europeanization that is sensitive to the national context. As such, the governance approach offered here incorporates the insights of the Differentiated Polity (DP) model developed by Rhodes as an organising perspective for understanding contemporary British politics and government. The paper has seven sections. Section two considers a number of first generation Europeanization studies, which focus on institutional adaptation to EU pressures; section three considers second generation concerns of ideas, values and identity; section four addresses the definitional issues that abound in the literature and suggests a definition that embraces first and second generation concerns; section five develops a governance approach to the study of Europeanization; section six utilises this approach in relation to EU regional policy; section seven concludes by reflecting on the utility of the governance approach to Europeanization.